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Chicago: A City of a Thousand Films

By Ray Pride On January 15, 2009

Slide 1: Call Northside 777

Slide 1: Call Northside 777

The first Mayor Daley didn't like movies being made in Chicago, His Chicago. His provincial pride kept the city from being captured in deathless, breathless visions of urbanity, like Manhattan got in Sweet Smell of Success.

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For Movie City: Chicago we asked film critic, writer, and photographer Ray Pride to find his favorite Chicago films in his own photography of the city. The result is a lyrical look at a city by a man who loves movies.

Movies, however great or awful, play in present tense. But memories deepen them, like in the most cryptic reaches of dreams. Movies go on location in search of this thisness, for authenticity. If you know a city, or wish you could know it, glimpses of a familiar or iconographic landscape will pull you into yourself. I feel that way thinking of movies set in Chicago. These pictures began as research for an as-yet unproduced screenplay set in the city where I've lived almost all my adult life. The images became a lucid dreaming of sorts, of customary paths and recurrent figures. But as well, they reflect impressions of half-remembered or misremembered movies set on this patch of prairie by the water, working as parallels of mood in mind, if not precisely what you would find slipping a DVD out of its case and into this moment in time.